help, or to hold her, and that
was a sacrifice such as had never been seen in that place.

"No hand but mine shall touch you:--O Bird of my Wilderness!" he
said.

"In the Light beyond the light I wait for you at the trail's end,"
she said, and laughed that his hand rested on her breast.

And the sun, blood red, came over the edge of the world, and Don Ruy
cried aloud at the lifted hand of Tahn-te, and the gleam of the white
flint knife.

But the guard closed in, and one of his own men caught him, and asked
for pardon afterwards, and when he could again see the altar, the
knife was red, and a heart was held outward to the sun that looked
like the flame of burning worlds.

And a long, shivering, high keyed chant of the Te-hua people went
upwards to the sky, that the gods might know they were witness. But in
the midst of it the rumbling as of thunder was under their feet and
the earth rocked. Sulphurous fumes came upwards from the long closed
crevices of the solitary mesa; and to the south there was the crash as
of falling worlds, and the great mesa of The Face lifted before their
eyes, and settled again as a wave of the river lifts and breaks on the
shore.

The chant of the sacrifice was silenced on their lips, and they fled
downward at that sight, for the face of the God-Maid of the mesa no
longer looked upwards to the sun! The outline of the brow, and the
cheek, and the dainty woman's chin they could still see;--but the face
was turned from them--turned toward the south--where the gods have
ever gone in an evil season!

And only Don Ruy Sandoval saw the heart put back in the breast of the
witch maid, and saw her wrapped in the white robe of the Po-Ahtun-ho,
and saw the crevice where the Powers of the Underworld had opened a
grave for her there on the Mesa of the Hearts.

And even he watched afar off; for there was that in the face of the
Indian priest not to be understood by the white man who felt both pity
and horror.

But he waited at the foot of the mesa, and held the canoe while the
Po-Ahtun-ho, who had the logic of a white man, but the heart of an
Indian, came down and entered it in silence, and as they crossed the
river, stared as though scarcely seeing it, at The Face now turned
southwards on the mesa.

"You--loved her?" said Don Ruy at last and something of the tone of a
lover in the voice made Tahn-te close his eyes for a moment, and then
look at the Castilian. He did not need to speak.

"Yet--